Inside Job movie review & film summary (2010)
Some may say, well, he was the boss. I say, who the hell did he think he was? I've waited for elevators with my bosses, who have included Marshall Field and Rupert Murdoch. They seemed content enough that there was an elevator.
One of the most fascinating aspects of “Inside Job” involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves. She says it was an accepted part of the corporate culture that hookers at $1,000 an hour and up were kept on retainer, that cocaine was the fuel and that she and her girls didn't understand how some traders could even function on the trading floor after most nights.
That leads me to the matter of financial reform. We need it. We need to return to an era of transparency. We need to restore a market of investments that are what they seem to be. We need to deprive investment banks of the right to trade on behalf of their own accounts. We need to require them to work on behalf of their customers. In the days before deregulation, it was hard to get a mortgage from a bank that didn't believe you could make the payments. It recent years, it was hard not to get one.
The bad mortgages were sliced and diced into so many derivatives that the banks themselves had no idea what paper they were holding. In one of the more refreshing moments during the housing meltdown, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) advised her constituents: “If a bank forecloses on you, don't move and demand they produce a copy of your mortgage. In many cases, they can't.” She was prophetic; banks are now halting foreclosures all over the country.
Gene Siskel, who was a wise man, gave me the best investment advice I've ever received. “You can never outsmart the market, if that's what you're trying to do,” he said. “Find something you love, for reasons you understand, that not everyone agrees with you about, and put your money in it.” The stocks I thought of were Apple, Google and Steak 'n Shake. I bought some shares. That was a long time ago. Reader, if I had invested every penny I had on Gene's advice, today I would be a Master of the Universe.
Revised from my Cannes 2010 blog entry.
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